Criminal Enterprise - Department Head Fusion Academy Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to acknowledge your Fusion Academy coworkers. Our teachers are remarkably talented and extraordinarily committed to our model of personalized learning. I do hope that you have found an education setting that meets your professional needs, and I am disappointed to learn of your disheartenment. I encourage prospective employers and families to read my response because it comes from decades of experience in private and public education. I’d like to start from my personal and professional experience. Teaching is the toughest and most rewarding career. I taught in public schools for 13 years before leading curriculum/instruction for 2 years in the public school system. My passion for teaching and love of learning was nearly extinguished by the day-to-day management of 140 plus students. My curriculum had iron clad bumper pads that restricted my abilities to connect with my students, to engage them, to get them to love the content and learn. Not to mention the state and federally mandated assessments that required I teach to the test, instead of teaching with the intention that my students would learn, comprehend and grow. When I first joined Fusion, I taught while training for my soon-to-be administrative role, became a Head of School and today I oversee Fusion’s five New York City area campuses. Fusion’s focus is the student. There are hundreds of people who believe in the value of personalized education and have decades-long, meaningful careers here. I have been with Fusion for 6.5 years. Most of my peers share the same career trajectory, they started as teachers and grew. Fusion is not criminal. Fusion is revolutionary. Anyone seeking the constraints of a traditional teaching model and classroom will not find it here. One of my peers described our educational approach as liberating, and I could not agree more. Fusion follows educational state standards, and consistently receives credible and meaningful accreditation, most recently for our NYC-area campuses that included Middle State Accreditation. Our student-centric focus means we don’t adhere to the traditional academic year or teaching hours. We enroll students when they need us. Flexibility allows us to support students who need a learning environment outside of traditional school hours and months. Love, Motivate, Teach is our mantra. A mantra realized through an engaged and committed team. Our teachers guide students on a journey where they change their understanding of themselves and the futures they have the power to create. All students learn best when they feel safe, cared for, engaged, and confident in themselves as learners. We believe positive, authentic relationships - fostered by our one-to-one learning model - are the key to unlocking the incredible potential every student has. In order to support our students, we must support our teachers. We have a deep bench of training resources, both live and virtual. Our leadership, culture and education teams regularly engage our teachers and their department heads through continual learning opportunities and creation of educational resources. Families seek us for our 1:1 learning, many of whom come from a traditional school setting that is not meeting their student’s needs. We enroll and admit students we can support. When a students’ needs are beyond our capabilities, we encourage families to find a different educational setting. Our admission process is transparent. Our families share special challenges. We communicate the individual challenges of each student so that with our campus teams are equipped to support them; that includes the professional training and educational resources previously mentioned. Our model is built on learning mastery. We do adhere to a grading structure, however, because it’s individualized, we don’t follow traditional bell curves. An “A” is never assured. An end grade reflects a student’s subject mastery. Employee reviews found here are not solicited. Employees, current and former, opine here, as is their right. My peers and I regularly read the reviews, we share both praise and criticism, and when the latter is credible, we use it as an opportunity for improvement. The campus referred to did have turnover a couple of years ago. On the heels of the COVID pandemic and the nationally ordered shutdown, we welcomed a new head of school. The school transitioned quickly to virtual learning during that time. She has since led that school with grace and dignity in a city that was one of the hardest impacted by COVID. Moreover, our New York City area schools are led by talented and gifted educators, most of whom have been in their roles for several years. Last, our NYC teachers and leadership teams mirror the diversity of America’s most diverse city. It is my hope that parents read this response and visit a campus to see our teachers in action – love, motivate, teach – is real. It’s the reason I continue to work and lead this region and am proud of the teams who daily commit to seeing their students’ flourish. I did report this review to Glassdoor and was disappointed to learn that the reviewer’s unfounded charges of criminality met its community standards.